Irreligious Bible Student - Think Atheist2018-02-18T05:21:35Zhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/forum/topics/irreligious-bible-student?commentId=1982180%3AComment%3A1239568&xg_source=activity&feed=yes&xn_auth=no
1. Crackpot: God is real!2.…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12430742013-01-04T06:37:43.850ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
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<p>1. Crackpot: God is real!<br/>2. Us: Evidence, please?<br/>3. Crackpot: I have no evidence, you dumb ass.<br/>4. Us: Sorry, we don't believe you.<br/>5. Crackpot: (Enraged) THIS SHIT IS GOD! (Storms out or gets kicked out.)</p>
<p>If this is a recuring pattern, should we just generalize, and offer a reponse after (3), 'Please come back after you find some evidence. We will be willing to humor you then!'</p>
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<p>1. Crackpot: God is real!<br/>2. Us: Evidence, please?<br/>3. Crackpot: I have no evidence, you dumb ass.<br/>4. Us: Sorry, we don't believe you.<br/>5. Crackpot: (Enraged) THIS SHIT IS GOD! (Storms out or gets kicked out.)</p>
<p>If this is a recuring pattern, should we just generalize, and offer a reponse after (3), 'Please come back after you find some evidence. We will be willing to humor you then!'</p> ".. to educate people on the…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12431652013-01-04T06:20:30.216ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
<p>".. to educate people on the Bible. Not to make ignorant Christians or Atheists but rather to make informed Christians or Atheists. At least as much as this is possible. "</p>
<p>Ahh, good the truth comes out and is made clear. How is this working for you? What if your ill informed version of 'truth', is not received, will you resort to tantrums and name calling again.</p>
<p>I am not really interested in returning to your feeding bucket. I spent about 1/4 of my life there, 1/4 too long, and…</p>
<p>".. to educate people on the Bible. Not to make ignorant Christians or Atheists but rather to make informed Christians or Atheists. At least as much as this is possible. "</p>
<p>Ahh, good the truth comes out and is made clear. How is this working for you? What if your ill informed version of 'truth', is not received, will you resort to tantrums and name calling again.</p>
<p>I am not really interested in returning to your feeding bucket. I spent about 1/4 of my life there, 1/4 too long, and allowed christian bullys way too much slack.</p> "But the point I'm making, He…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12430722013-01-04T06:11:45.724ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
<p>"But the point I'm making, Heather, is that he's so deliberately ambiguous, that one can't refute anything he says, because when he's finished verbalizing, he hasn't said anything."</p>
<p>I do remember something about, 'confounding the learned', which is of course not the same as, 'having something learned to say'. </p>
<p>"But the point I'm making, Heather, is that he's so deliberately ambiguous, that one can't refute anything he says, because when he's finished verbalizing, he hasn't said anything."</p>
<p>I do remember something about, 'confounding the learned', which is of course not the same as, 'having something learned to say'. </p> But you are attempting to mai…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12431632013-01-04T06:08:14.442ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
<p>But you are attempting to maintain or enlighten your 'absolute faith'. Only relying upon folks that parrot your basic commitments, is not the way to obtain an honest insight into belief.</p>
<p>If you are not a 'Christian', then why is the argumention about christian subjects so important? I quess I could ask this of myself also, but you seem so insulting and unreasonable that you are a couriosity. </p>
<p>But you are attempting to maintain or enlighten your 'absolute faith'. Only relying upon folks that parrot your basic commitments, is not the way to obtain an honest insight into belief.</p>
<p>If you are not a 'Christian', then why is the argumention about christian subjects so important? I quess I could ask this of myself also, but you seem so insulting and unreasonable that you are a couriosity. </p> Or the daily gatherng of athe…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12431302013-01-04T02:57:17.094ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
<p>Or the daily gatherng of atheists, picking on the most recent theist that has volunteered to be the next meal! Don't get me wrong, after a life time of putting up with theist grandstanding, meanness, falt finding and general cursing to hell, it does seem that turn around is fair play.</p>
<p>I just can't find any 'place' to send the theists to. When we have paved hell over, pulled out the fence posts, kicked the gate down, and told satan to get a real job, it just looks like we are stuck…</p>
<p>Or the daily gatherng of atheists, picking on the most recent theist that has volunteered to be the next meal! Don't get me wrong, after a life time of putting up with theist grandstanding, meanness, falt finding and general cursing to hell, it does seem that turn around is fair play.</p>
<p>I just can't find any 'place' to send the theists to. When we have paved hell over, pulled out the fence posts, kicked the gate down, and told satan to get a real job, it just looks like we are stuck with them. It could be worse, but I just can't bring myself to it. I am just trying to have a nice day...</p> David,
The dialogue was on pa…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-04:1982180:Comment:12428802013-01-04T01:18:16.140ZEdhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/EdwardDelauter
<p>David,</p>
<p>The dialogue was on page 12 with Justin. You never offered a response to his observations. So I'll repost Justin now:</p>
<div class="description" id="desc_1982180Comment1239571"><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>"Hello David, and welcome. I hope we haven't scared you off yet! I wanted to pursue a somewhat different line of inquiry than some of the other posts, if I may. You indicated that one of your major objections to conventional Christianity is that they have allowed…</p>
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<p>David,</p>
<p>The dialogue was on page 12 with Justin. You never offered a response to his observations. So I'll repost Justin now:</p>
<div class="description" id="desc_1982180Comment1239571"><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>"Hello David, and welcome. I hope we haven't scared you off yet! I wanted to pursue a somewhat different line of inquiry than some of the other posts, if I may. You indicated that one of your major objections to conventional Christianity is that they have allowed pagan and philosophical influences to shape their understanding of the Bible. I fully agree that such influences played a major role in the development of certain Christian doctrines and rituals, although I disagree about some of the particulars you mention (your attribution of the doctrine of the cross to Constantine and hell to Dante/Milton seem vastly implausible and much too late, historically speaking). However, these influences strike me as unavoidable and unproblematic (indeed, probably a good thing), and the exact same complaint could be made of the Bible itself.</p>
<p>1) Every religion is a complex product of the cultural milieu in which it emerges. It reflects and incorporates the language of its creators, their traditional ways of thinking about morality and the cosmos, and even their economic and political systems (see, for instance, Jesus articulating his teachings through stories set in the economic structures of first-century Palestine). "New" religions are never completely new: like all human innovations, they build upon elements of the past while introducing other elements that are genuinely novel. You would certainly admit that all I've said is true for all of the thousands of religions that you don't agree with: surely Islam is largely (though not entirely) a synthesis of Judaism, Christianity, and Bedouin culture; surely Mormonism is a product of its time and place (albeit a strange one); Buddhism obviously derives from Hinduism, and many other eastern religions build on both of these; and surely the numerous variations of paganism across the world are simply gradual developments on pre-existing pagan (or proto-pagan) ideas. None of these religions emerged "ex nihilo," but instead represent creative combinations of the new and the old. This is not intrinsically a good or a bad thing -- it's simply a universal fact about how human institutions and ideas evolve, and religion, it turns out, is a human institution. If you acknowledge all I've said up to this point, you have two options (unless you can think of a third...). You can either recognize, as many Christians do, that Christianity and the Bible are likewise, and unavoidably, human products (at least in part) and that they can be meaningfully analyzed with the same historical methods we bring to bear on *all* other world religions -- in which case the fact of pagan influence both in the Bible and in subsequent interpretation of the Bible would be completely unsurprising and unbobjectionable -- or you can say that the Bible is exempt from the ordinary methods and results of historical inquiry because it is authored primarily by God, and only secondarily by humans. You seem to be embracing something like the second option I've outlined. But you must realize that in doing so -- by making the Bible out to be an exception to an otherwise universal historical fact -- you bear the burden of proof. Though it is logically *possible* that the Bible truly is an exception, and that historical analysis could reveal it to be such, all that we know about *every other world religion* is against that proposition. When we have such a well-established pattern about how world religions work, with a large sample size (all world religions), basic principles of statistical rationality (for more info, read up on statistical "base rates" and the Bayes Theorem) requires that we review any particular claim about an exception with deep and presumptive (but not absolute) skepticism. Christianity says we should not have a "hard heart" and should simply believe, but historically conscious rationality tells us that we should do precisely the opposite: we should assume that the Bible and Christianity reflect the same patterns of human influence and design that we see in literally every other religion, unless you can prove (decisively) the contrary.</p>
<p>2) When we turn to the Bible, many scholars say that far from discovering an exception to the universal pattern of the world religions, we discover a paradigmatic example of that pattern. (I recognize that many Christian scholars -- and even more untrained Christian apologists -- claim otherwise.) This is an area that I don't know too much about, apart from my own reading of the Bible in its English translation and a well-written book by Robert Wright called "The Evolution of God." But I came away from both experiences with a strong sense that the Old Testament itself does not reflect a single, consistent, monotheistic conception of God, but rather a gradual evolution through various types of polytheism ultimately culminating in monotheism. Aren't there several places where God refers to itself in the plural form, suggesting that it is simply one member of a committee of controller deities -- perhaps the chairperson, but certainly not the exclusive man upstairs? Aren't there numerous instances in which Yahweh and Old Testament human exemplars speak of the "gods" of other nations as though those gods were real, at war with Yahwah, and in need of elimination? (I recognize that there are other passages indicating that those gods are not real -- but that's my entire point. We're looking at stages of historical development across different authors, not a universal anti-polytheist narrative that consistently threads through the entire Old Testament.) Isn't Yahweh the god (with a little "g") of a particular place (Israel), a particular community of people (the Jews), and even of particular persons (Abraham and Isaac), at war with the gods of neighboring communities and peoples, before he becomes the single God of the entire world? In other words, aren't the earlier depictions of Yahweh much like the place-bound deities with narrow and well-defined spheres of influence that are so commonly found in many pagan religions across the world?</p>
<p>3) On a normative level, what's so bad about pagan and philosophical influences on the development of Christianity? You cite Plato and Socrates, and in my experience, those fellas are often (though not always) far more insightful than the Bible. More generally, though, I submit that it's a good thing that religious development often strives to harmonize and incorporate disparate threads. That's part of why religion is sometimes able to bring different kinds of people, and indeed different societies, into fruitful relationships with one another. That process reflects dialogue, empathy, compromise, and cooperation, all of which are good things. Fundamentalists dislike these processes because they generally insist on the purity and absoluteness of their narrow view of the world. But that strikes me as a vice, not a virtue. </p>
<p>Thoughts?"</p>
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</div> It's also downloadable as a k…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-03:1982180:Comment:12429732013-01-03T22:39:47.831ZPope Beaniehttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/PaulRyan
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible" target="_blank">It's</a> also <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Jefferson-Bible-ebook/dp/B0028AEFS8/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1" target="_blank">downloadable as a kindle version</a>. (Also see other, inexpensive or free choices, lower on that page.)</p>
<p>Hmm, guess I'll make sure the link's posted in the TA books forum, too.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible" target="_blank">It's</a> also <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Jefferson-Bible-ebook/dp/B0028AEFS8/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1" target="_blank">downloadable as a kindle version</a>. (Also see other, inexpensive or free choices, lower on that page.)</p>
<p>Hmm, guess I'll make sure the link's posted in the TA books forum, too.</p> I woke up a 3 am, myself, and…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-03:1982180:Comment:12428702013-01-03T22:11:17.804ZPope Beaniehttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/PaulRyan
<p>I woke up a 3 am, myself, and read and wrote stuff here. That might count as co-dependency?</p>
<p>I woke up a 3 am, myself, and read and wrote stuff here. That might count as co-dependency?</p> I keep thinking that we have…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-03:1982180:Comment:12428692013-01-03T22:09:14.484ZJames Coxhttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/JamesCox
<p>I keep thinking that we have a web of theists that are testing methods of getting the atheist goat, but are so bad at it, or disturbed, that they are just bugs on a windshield. So far most of the theist folks make extream claims of deep knowledge, that mear mortals might not be able to obtain.</p>
<p>Getting lost in the deep history and mental unsettledness of people that came before, must be a horrible quest that some of us indulge. Trying to find 'God' in words, seems condusive to becoming…</p>
<p>I keep thinking that we have a web of theists that are testing methods of getting the atheist goat, but are so bad at it, or disturbed, that they are just bugs on a windshield. So far most of the theist folks make extream claims of deep knowledge, that mear mortals might not be able to obtain.</p>
<p>Getting lost in the deep history and mental unsettledness of people that came before, must be a horrible quest that some of us indulge. Trying to find 'God' in words, seems condusive to becoming lost in details and interpritation. The sciences should be a wonderful respite from this, atleast we might find some place marginally confortable to stand. </p>
<p> </p> Robert that made me laugh out…tag:www.thinkatheist.com,2013-01-03:1982180:Comment:12430252013-01-03T22:08:24.337ZStregahttp://www.thinkatheist.com/profile/MzStrega
<p>Robert that made me laugh out loud, literally</p>
<p>Robert that made me laugh out loud, literally</p>